


Dear Mother

by TheHangedMan



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Disturbing Themes, M/M, Underage Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 19:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10703988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHangedMan/pseuds/TheHangedMan
Summary: Based on supports with Beruka in which she finds Niles's mother's grave and Leo, the day that they met. Happy Birthday Niles.





	Dear Mother

Morning dew began to coat the sides of Niles’s boots and soaked the knees of his pants with every footfall through overgrown browning grasses. There was a heavy chill in the early morning air that hinted at a swiftly approaching winter. Autumn leaves of red, brown, and golds still clung desperately to their branches fighting every violent gust that promised to tear them from their heavenly perch. It was inevitable that they would fall to the earth to be trampled until they decayed into the dirt and made usable soil for the next spring when their patron oaks dropped seeds to sprout new trees who would begin the cycle again in this rocky field. And If he hadn’t been told otherwise by Beruka he would have believed he was walking in a field.

Not the long abandoned final resting place of his late mother. 

He pulled his hood up over his head in a pathetic attempt to fight against the cold that reddened his ears and stung at his face. Had he not been under the graces of Lord Leo, with a change of clothes and a fireplace to return to, he would not have considered this damp trek in the first place.

His muffled footsteps slowed to a halt before a particularly uninteresting stone, marked with an almost illegible short crudely chiseled name. It jutted out from the frozen dirt, years of neglect visible from its state of disrepair.

How Beruka had found the crudely marked grave to begin with was still a mystery to him. It was a far ways off from her own mothers that she would visit far more frequently than he would his. That girl was an oddity to say the least, from what small glimpse into her past that Niles had been given, her mother had been no less warm and loving to her. Yet, some unnamable emotion kept dragging her back to this same spot where he would he would sometimes watch her sit for hours on end in some silent conversation with a women who ceased to draw breath. 

An assassin of her kind didn’t seem like the type to carry sentiment for the dead, but Niles didn’t pretend to understand what went through her head. The emotion she claimed to have begun to feel in this place was not something he shared.

It didn’t appear that she had come today, not that he’d have noticed if she hadn’t wanted him to anyway. For all his skill as a thief she was a breed apart. While he felt comfort sulking around in the dark, she had a sixth sense for it.

For today, at least, he was glad she wasn’t here. He preferred not to have an audience.

Niles carried no compassion for the bones that lay buried beneath his feet, as far as he was concerned, the moment a body stopped drawing breath it ceased to be a human at all. The only cause for burial would be to slow the spread of disease that ran rampant through the slums. 

Who had loved a woman, without enough compassion to care for her own child, enough to bury her? A husband maybe? A brother? A favorite lover? He liked to believe that she had been a whore, who would spread her legs for any man that walked by for a chance at another meal. Like mother like son, he thought darkly, a grin playing it’s way onto his face. 

It was comforting believing the whole world was just as unforgivable.

But no, that wasn’t quite right.

He shrugged off a bow and quiver from his back and sat down on a moss infested rock a few paces away that nestled itself into the roots of a sapling. His knees crossed comfortably, one over the other and he leaned back so the bark supported him. Deft fingers plucked an arrow from its container and he ran calloused fingers over the meticulously sharpened tip trying to remind himself for the reason of his visit.

No, he’d never forgotten.

“Dearest mother,” He began in a sing songy voice. Unlike Beruka, that was nothing silent about his conversations with the dead.

“Do you know what today is?” he leaned an ear towards the stone mockingly as if waiting for a reply. 

When the crumbling stone gave no answer he continued. “What’s that? You don’t?”

He lifted his free hand to his chest and grabbed at his shirt dramatically leaning forward and pointing the arrow shaft at the marker. “Well I’m hurt truly! How could you have forgotten your own son’s birthday?” 

He paused his rambling for a moment to stare at the grave. It wasn’t that he expected an answer or that he believed that his dear old mother was listening from the beyond. So why did he choose this place as the target of his ridicule?

“No, you’re right, this isn’t my birthday is it? The day you brought me into this wonderful world has already come and past in mid spring and from the chill you feel in your bones it must be nearly winter. On that account you are correct.” He slumped back into the sapling with enough force to knock a few more leaves to the ground.

“What? I’m greedy to wish for more than one birthday. Oh mother, you know me too well! To want for cake and presents like the nobles receive twice a year, my avarice is really unbecoming.” He tutted softly tapping the arrow against his temple gently. 

The crooked smile slid from his face, “But no mother dearest, I am not mistaken.” The joking tone in his voice melted away replaced by what could almost be considered controlled rage, “My life did not begin when you brought me red faced and screaming into this place. The life you gave me and threatened to take away as you left me as a child to the gutters was not mine. No, my life began the day that boy was damned to die by the thieves and scum that called him friend. And death did take him and hell did swallow that man abandoned by the gods named Zero, for that’s what he was, nothing, whole and he did died that day. Not a death of flesh and blood, but a death of purpose. His soul blackened by so much hate for what he was, it was no wonder that he longed for death, an end to an unending cycle. So on that day, he ended his own life...”

Niles closed his eye letting the stillness of the burial grounds seep into him. Distantly a lone bird chirped, and he registered it lazily. The arrows shaft rolled mindlessly between his forefinger and thumb. Hazy memories played through his mind like a child’s shoddily drawn pictures in the dirt.

A field mouse. It’s tiny feet scurrying at his eye level on the creaky wooden flooring with exponential haste. It hurt, his entire body hurt. His customer lay next to him musing about one trivial matter after another. Zero responded with all of the polite “yes milords” and “no milords” his patron had taught him. The man had been some degenerate noble with delicate hands that had never known a day of work. Jeweled fingers defiled his body over and over with a practiced roughness meant only for the orphans of the gutter. It was the first time Zero really and truly cursed the gods. 

Torrential rain. The flooding of the slums. The dirt was far too hard packed to drink in the rains leaving flash flooding a yearly occurrence. That one year had been particularly bad. The rampant spread of filth and disease as waste and decay was washed into the streets. He caught a sickness that ravaged his body for weeks leaving his muscles unbearably sore until he was too weak to work in the city, his throat too raw to speak, and painful lumps in his throat that made eating painful. Coughing up bright red blood frothy blood and mucus into his hand. 

A horribly disfigured man. Hardly even a shell of a human, still breathing left in the streets to die. The man named Zero had known him. He had been a field worker once. Had felt enough pity to give Zero work to do in the fields as a means to a quick meal. Puss filled his wounds and they festered angrily all over the man's body. A survivor of the Hoshidan war, unfortunate really. It would have been better if he had just died. Zero had been older then, he understood nothing good came out of compassion. The looming shadow of castle Krakenburg a constant reminder of that sentiment. 

A pile of money. The first time he had really stolen. Not a loaf of bread from the town baker or a trinket from a neighbor, but the slow planned robbery of a noble’s summer home. His cohorts greed ridden hands divvying up the spoils “fairly”. It was the first time Zero had more than enough to spare.

The taste of blood. Not his own. The throbbing empty socket that had once housed his second eye.

“...And on that same day, he was given life anew. Not by the gods in their heavens so far out of reach, but by a child with the same black abandoned heart as his own. On that day he ceased to be your son.” The words a mere whisper now rolled off his tongue one by one as the real meaning of the words he still felt he could scarcely believed himself, settled into his mind. He was not Zero.

A new vivid memory played in his head contrasting the old like one of the many brightly painted murals that decorated the castle. 

The frigid fall air, the pain of thorns digging into his wrist and ankles as vines wrapped his appendages tightly, a guard's rough hand in his hair pulling up his face so that he was forced to look his captor in the eye. That captor, a boy, no older than fifteen with smooth pale skin and mussed blond hair. Sleep still clouded his deep brown eyes that looked down at Zero with all the sternness a child could muster. A tome worth more than the entirety of the slums glowing in his hand, the means of his execution.

Niles remembered clearly the resignation that dead man had felt. If this was to be his dying day then so be it.

“Why don’t you beg for your life?” The young noble demanded of the thief.

The man named Zero scanned the boy’s face and found no hint of mockery. It was a legitimate question, not one delivered with cruelty. A question he would entertain with a legitimate answer. “One would require a life to begin with to beg for it.” He answered simply. “I have no life and therefore I have not a plea in my heart to gift to you.”

He was rewarded with a sharp blow to his side, “Respect lowborn, know you not to whom you speak.” The guard chastised, “This is the second prince of Nohr, Lord Leo. Mind your manners.”

A delicate hand was lifted at the guard to call for halt and those young sparkling eyes scanned over the criminal with an analytical intensity that felt out of place for a youth of his age. “What is your name?”

“Zero.”

“You wish to die then Zero? Surly if you hold no value for your own life there is someone you have that holds love for you.”

A hoarse laugh escaped his lips and he threw back his head much to the surprise of the guard that held his matted hair. “Love is only afforded to those who live up in lovely little jeweled bird cages who no not of suffering little prince.” A defiant smile curled onto his lips. “Death is but mercy to my kind, the greatest kindness that can be offered to scum like me.” Zero spat out the last words as if to make a point.

Unphased by the obvious jab, Leo held Zero’s gaze.

“Then love me. If you have no life left then what happens to that body of yours is no longer a concern of yours. Serve me under a new life and a new name. Cast aside that nothingness you feel and give me yourself to me. Die not for nothingness but for me.”

“P-prince Leo…” The guard behind Zero stuttered. 

“Quiet. The decision is his.”

The genuine shock he felt reverberated through his body and shook him to the core. A joke, that’s what this had to be, but then why did the little prince carry the same resolve for life in his eyes that Zero had held for death. 

“Do you not understand who I am? I’m a thief, a murderer, I am not one of these well trained fools that parades around your pretty little perch and waits on you hand and foot.”

“Are you refusing my offer?”

Every ounce of his being searched for the deception he was being fed, but he found none. Naivety of a pampered child maybe, but not lies. 

“N-no, I accept.” His voice shook, the words didn’t feel real.

“Then today the thief Zero has died and been reborn Niles, a retainer of his Lord Leo.” The boy closed his tome and the vines fell away from Zero’s arms.

He opened his eye and the all too bright mid afternoon sun of the empty field came back to him once again, its rays gently warming him and drying the dew from his clothes. He drank in this instant and burned it into his mind. Not a single second had felt as real to him as the moment he had taken on the title of retainer, but every instant since then he felt as if his life had some kind of clarity, like a layer of grime had been washed off of a stain glass window and a vivid color and light allowed to filter through. 

Maybe, without knowing it, just as Zero had bared his soul to the prince in that moment so had Leo done to he. To ask a lowly thief to love him was not the words of a content song bird in a jeweled cage but of a jealous mockingbird imitating the songs of happier birds, passed over again and again and forgotten in a wrought iron prison. A boy so full of ugly emotions, so desperate to be loved. 

There was no one more suitable for Niles’s affections.

So he served him, with every ounce of his being, trying to repay back the wonderful clarity he had been given in this new life. His Lord Leo, prince of Nohr, third in line to the throne, first of his name, let him ask the world be burned and Niles would see it done. Until the sun failed to set and the castles and all this finery turned ash and even past that when the gods turned their backs on the rest of the world and everything ceased to be, Niles’s heart belonged to him. 

“Dearest mother.” He began again feeling his passion subside, “but I suppose, you are no mother of mine. Your son is dead and rotting in the ground beside you, both strangers to me, you and he.” He returned the arrow to his quiver and sat up slinging it over his shoulder as he rose to his feet. 

“It’s rather pointless to speak to another’s dead mother. This will be my last visit.” A final grin played at the corner of his mouth as he turned away from the pitiful mound of earth, “I’ll send my love with Beruka.”


End file.
